S

Cornball

The Kid Pro

JAMES HINER

D.F.

Why should I have been disturbed by the words? I'd been anxious for a long time to see him drop the correspondence. Now, apparently it was at an end. What did it matter then if he was calling me "a psychological whore?" I wasn't trying to skirt any issue, but the phrase seemed totally meaningless to me. And besides, he put the matter negatively, not positively; actually he was saying I wasn't a such-and-such (whatever the term intended). Precisely, though, that was the point. Take a meaningless phrase and say it backwards: it was in just such fashion that significant things got attached to Cornball.

Consider the matter of his name, "Cornball, the Kid Pro." Cornball? Simply because he came from Iowa; that's all. The fact of the matter was that he'd been born and raised in Des Moines; he couldn't have been less a "cornball" if he'd grown up in New York or Los Angeles. But when it became known that he had enlisted in Iowa, "Cornball" he became, without any further excuse. Now Cornball was proud. This was probably his biggest real defect, but

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